The Key of Reason

IRGO Seminar Series 2009 - updated

irgo:

Monday, May 25th, 12-1pm: John Kaiser, Manager, ICT Strategy and Services, Division of Health Science, will be facilitating a discussion on fostering innovation in ICT in the health sciences.  School of Business Boardroom CO4.20.

Friday, June 12th, 12-1pm: Andrew Long, Information Science, will be speaking to the topic “Life is Tweet: Emergent Micro-narratives on Twitter”.    School of Business CO2.07.

Wednesday, July 22nd, 12-1pm: Prajesh Chhannabai, PhD candidate at Information Science, will be speaking on his research into online/mobile social networking and dissemination of health information.   School of Business Boardroom CO4.20.

Friday, August 14th, 12-1pm: John Egenes, Department of Music, speaking on Remix Culture: The Folk Process in the 21st Century. School of Business CO2.07.

Wednesday, September 2nd, 12-1pm:  Alan Toy, Department of Accountancy and Business Law, speaking on current research on consent to online privacy policies .  School of Business Boardroom CO4.20.

All seminars are also listed on the Facebook page if you use that site to manage your RSVPs.

Please distribute this information among your colleagues.

How To Email Academic Staff/How To Reply

Emails are becoming an increasingly important mode of communication, both for socialization and information exchange.  One of the roles of an academic teacher (particular a communications academic teacher) is to help students develop a style of communication which is functional, correct, effective, and in their own voice.

Given the proliferation of posts in the blogs I read about how to email a staff member, it’s obviously not just a local problem.

So, in my ongoing attempt to illuminate, educate, and procrastinate, here are Aunty E’s tips for students email an academic staff member for help.  Note!  These lessons can also be applied to emails in other contexts!

Firstly, students should be aware that they are making a request, and should frame their tone accordingly.  Unless something has gone badly wrong in the staff-student relationship, you should be able to reasonably expect at least a courteous reply, so it behooves you to be courteous too.

DO: “Hello Professor.  Could I please make a time to see you this week to discuss the feedback on my first essay.  I am on campus all day Thursday.  Let me know if there is a time on that day that suits.  Thanks, Full Student Name/Class Name and Time”

DON’T:  “Hey, my mark was too low!  Where are you!”

See the difference?  The first would get you “Yes, of course, I am also free Thursdays after 2pm if that is better.”  The latter would get you at best an polite “My office hours are X, perhaps see me then?” and a prime place as a topic of gossip amongst the staff members’ friends later.  Especially if the email was sent at 11.30pm on a Saturday night (shocking, I know, but we do leave the office occasionally).

Secondly, and even more importantly, be clear, concise and specific.  Yes, the issue you are grappling with is the most important thing in your life right now.  But for your lecturer, it’s probably not even currently on their radar (to let you in on a little secret, assessments worry lecturers when they are creating them, and when they have to mark them.  In between, we pass the worry over to you and promptly forget about it to make room for all the other worries we have!)  Also remember that your class is just one of many obligations that lecturer has.   You are a precious and unique snowflake, just like everyone else.  Don’t expect a lecturer to even remember your name, particularly on a contextless email.  So provide that context to help them out:

DO:  “Hello Professor.  I am in your CLASS101 lecture on Thursday at noon, and I have a question about the first essay.  The topic I am working with is the one on post-feminism and superhero comic book representations of women, and I am having trouble making sense of McRobbie’s articulation of post-feminism in the required reading.  Am I correct in assuming that she thinks that post-feminism is a repudiation of feminist ideals?  If so, I’m still a little stuck trying to apply that to superheroines - I’m thinking of looking specifically at Wonder Woman, but not entirely sure yet.  Can you suggest any ways to link the two together?  Thanks - Student’s Full Name and ID/Student Number

DON’T:  “Hey, I’m stuck on the essay.  Help?”

REALLY DON’T:  “so my bfreind just brok up w/ me and ive just been slobbing around the house instead of lectures, hahahaha, u get what i mean.  anyway, totes stuck on that question thingy.  what does it mean?  oh, can i have an extension, probably gonna need one.  l8tr!

In the first email, I know which class, and which section (useful if there are multiple sections or tutorials), which question in that class the student is dealing with, where they are up to in terms of their research, and the general area of the problem.  It is in their ‘voice’ but it gives me all the information I need to make suggestions to help them progress.  I’d also remember this student as being switched on, engaged, and eager to learn.

The second email - I don’t know who they are, which essay they are dealing with, or what their problem is.  I’d probably email back requesting more info.  I’d remember this student as being slack, even if they’d been working like a fiend for two weeks on the essay.

The third has no structure, an informal tone, is unclear, and inappropriately demanding.  Remember kids, in academia as in the jungle - don’t make anyone above you in the food chain grumpy.

Finally, subject lines are important.  On an average day, I get over 100 pieces of email from all over the place.  No subject, or a meaningless subject like “hey” don’t tell me what I need to prioritize your email in the right place, so it will probably be the last thing I deal with when clearing the box.  You don’t want to be last.  Trust me.  Last is bad.

A class name and a suggestion of the content are much more useful.  For the good email above, perhaps “CLASS101: Question re: focus of first essay”  I know which class it is, I know it’s a question on an upcoming assessment.  Enough info to prioritize it correctly.

Replying to Email: Staff to Students

A lot has been made of the quality of student email to staff, but I would like to add that the same rules apply when staff email students.  Even if you cannot help the student, a quick email can still be polite.  To whit:

DO: “Hi {Student} - Sorry, but extensions can only be granted with a medical certificate or similar.  If you have one, drop it into the office and they’ll adjust your hand-in date accordingly.”

DON’T: “No”

REALLY DON’T: {radio silence}

The first says no, but gives a reason, and explains what the student might do to follow up.  The second gives the same information, but provides no idea of next-actions (Remember, guys, we know the procedures and policies, but students may not!).  The third provides no information, and is just rude besides (remember that first comment on courtesy - yes, it applies to you too!)

Polite replies not only respect the student as a human being and someone you are in a position of authority to, they also demonstrate best practice for writing emails.  How can we expect students to learn when we fall into the same bad habits?

Also, I want to single out not-replying.  To me, this is highly discourteous.  Whilst no-one is arguing that you need be wedded to your email at all hours of the day and night, a student (or colleague for that matter) should reasonably be able to expect that they should receive a reply within a couple of working days of sending.  Leaving emails unanswered for weeks on end (esp. brief queries), deleting or redirecting everything from a student account (yes, it happens), or taking the attitude that if they’re not bashing down your door, then it wasn’t important, all set the wrong tone as to the effectiveness of email as a mode of professional communication. Even the worst email demands a reply, even if only to note where the student went wrong and if they’d care to try again, so will you.  I would argue that the only valid time to not reply is:

1. when the student is a repeat offender and has been warned that subsequent emails of that type will not receive a reply

2. when you are out of the office and have left note (with the class, an automatic reply, whatever) that you are unavailable.  In this case, make clear to the students whether you’d prefer them to see a colleague/TA or that you’ll be responding on your return.

3.  When students know that you prefer other modes of contact (phone, office hours) and that you only clear your email irregularly.

In all these cases, the student is not left wondering, but has a clear understanding of the place of email in the conversation between teacher and student.

With such clarity, frustration is reduced and communication accuracy is increased.  And that is a good thing.  Really!

hyperreality or absent-mindedness?

Just before the weekend, I was in a meeting, and I mentioned that the topic under discussion in the meeting might also be of interest to my friend and colleague, Sarah Stewart.  Oh, said Leigh B., who was also at the meeting, why don’t we invite her up to join us?

That might be hard, I said, as she’s back in Queensland, Australia.

No, Leigh replied.  I saw her this morning, she’s here.

A quick check after the meeting revealed that Sarah and Leigh had “seen” each other on Second Life and Skype - and Sarah was in Australia.

Sarah and I both immediately went to thoughts of hyperreality and simulacra, as the use of the Matrix poster in her blogpost shows!  For those who slept through their Baudrillard, simulacra and simulation in the Baudrillardian sense refers to the argument that humans experience “reality” only through symbols and symbolic representations - the map stands in for the territory.

What intrigued me about the whole situation was the mediated connection was so strong that Leigh was adamant that Sarah was in the building - he even gave her office a call!  This so-called “death of distance” is becoming an increasingly common phenomena in mediated interactions (though perhaps rarely as extreme as in Leigh’s case!) as people experience intimacy, connectivity, and intellectual and emotional engagement with people physically removed but still present through the mediation of technology and channels of communication.

‘You’re never alone when you’re on the phone,’ was one old slogan, where it was implied that the phone allowed people far away to extend themselves into your space.  With Second Life, Skype, and the plethora of IM platforms, the extension occurs both ways, as individuals project into a third (virtual) space to engage, interact, and satisfy both intellectual and emotional needs.

A lot of research energy is being put into questions such as photorealism and overcoming the Uncanny Valley in virtual worlds and social media spaces.  But maybe they should focus not on what we see, but what we feel.  With enough encouragement, our minds can take that pixellated avatar or staticky VoIP sound an make it feel like the other person really is there with us.

And then everyone else can tease you when you remember that they’re actually far, far away.

"thought in cold storage" or "ideas on the boil"

As the hour of my academic reckoning approaches, I’ve become more engaged with the debates around the shifting question of ‘what is quality scholarship?’

‘Quality’ evokes a value judgement, which means that someone has values that they judge against.  For academics and scholarly writers, this might be some lofty idea of “excellent research,” “innovative thinking” or “novelty and insight.”  But for academics existing in the real world (with real middle management!), this boils down into some sort of institutional review process, the most famous of which is the US tenure system.

The existing modes of institutional peer review revolve around the publication of “scholarly” works (articles, monographs, etc) in “appropriate” places: peer-reviewed printed journals and academic presses, in the main.

This has been challenged by the rise of Open Source Journals (of which First Monday is a good example).  It took me a while (in my innocence!) to grasp this, but there seems to be an entrenched belief that OS (online) journals are unscholarly.

I was confused by this because, in my experience with both print and online journals, I could not see the difference.  Both solicited submissions on themes and accepted unsolicited articles on a defined range of topics.  Both required scholarly articles to conform to discipline codes such as a referencing style.  Both (in my experience, any way) used the same back-end tools to facilitate information management.  Both tendered submissions to double-blind peer-review (with multiple reviewers), who wrote reports and recommendations which were considered by an editor and an editorial committee.  Both then took accepted articles, galley-proofed them, and published.  As a reader, I looked up and read both online (I cannot remember the last time I handled a dead-tree version of a journal).

So why, I wondered, was one acceptable to my institutional peer-review process, and the other was a curious novelty with no real value?  My confusion deepened as my “print” articles sank without a trace, whereas my OS articles lead to invitations to contribute to edited collections and requests for interviews with the media.  Wasn’t this part of the original lofty purpose of publishing, after all?  To stimulate informed debate and discussion?  And weren’t academics meant to explore the new edges in society and report back?  Isn’t that why were had the Ivy Towers in the first place (nice places to rappel off!  And look at that view!)

Yet to look at promotion, tenure and confirmation criteria is to see a set of rules that seem determined to stymie such innovation.  This is not an unrecognized phenomena — many fields (not just Net Studies) have recognized that existing models of institutional peer-review do not fully account for the actual experience of advancing knowledge and peer esteem, important aspects of the critical mission of scholarship.

Acknowledging the validity of peer-review in OS and online journals is one thing.  But what about peer esteem and the development of ideas outside formal articles?  Great ideas don’t just appear in journals (print or otherwise) and monographs.  Great ideas appear everywhere, and with new technologies of distribution and interaction, these ideas are circulating widely in all stages of their development.  Blogs are a great example of this - I am not alone in “thinking out loud” in this blog, pondering things that seem interesting, but which may or may not make it to an article for whatever reason (time, resources, sustained interest, etc).

But not every idea in a blog is a good one.  Not every great blog has a big enough readership for it to qualify for such formal recognition.  Not every online article is good - but neither is every print article or every book.

Perhaps the question we should be asking in our institutional contexts is not “where has this person published?” but rather “what have they contributed to the conversation?”  By recognizing that the conversation isn’t just pontificating from a journal article, but rather a constant give and take of article, book, blogpost, conference paper, volunteer labour (reviewing, or organizing, or even networking), we might develop a more nuanced picture of what it is that we have achieved.

And I might actually survive my hour of reckoning :)

another article - Futures

The joys of peer review means that there can be nothing for months, then two in a week ;)

You can read my new Futures article here:

Pearson, E. (2009).  Forecasts or Fallacies: Two issues for futures research on the Internet.  Futures. 41(3), 140-146.

Abstract: This paper explores the idea of futures research online, and considers whether two issues in particular — high rates of change, and complexity — pose a significant problem to the success of internet-orientated futures research. In particular, these two potential problems will be considered from the perspective of new developments within futures research frameworks and methodologies.

Cinema Journal SI: Digital Scholarship and Pedagogy

Cinema Journal is not required reading for many people in internet studies, but in their latest issue they have an awesome set of papers on digital scholarship and pedagogy.

Papers:

In Focus: Digital Scholarship and Pedagogy

Introduction: Media Studies and the Digital Humanities
Tara McPherson

Peer-to-Peer Review and the Future of Scholarly Authority
Kathleen Fitzpatrick

Engaging Academic and Nonacademic Communities through Online Scholarly Work
Avi Santo
Christopher Lucas

Digital Scholarship and Pedagogy, the Next Step: Cultural Science
John Hartley

Learning the Five Lessons of YouTube: After Trying to Teach There, I Don’t Believe the Hype
Alexandra Juhasz

On Digital Scholarship
Anne Friedberg

Hybrid Practices
Sharon Daniel

New Article Out (and everyone can read it!)

Pearson, E. (2009).  All The World Wide Web’s A Stage:  The performance of identity in online social networks.  First Monday, 14(3).

http://www.uic.edu/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2162/2127

For those that are unfamiliar with First Monday, it is the open source journal of Internet Studies, and while it may not be all that in terms of traditional modes of publishing, in the field of internet studies its a very useful journal to publish in.  Check out the archives while you’re there, there’s a lot of tasty stuff up and available for everyone.

SNS Gives You Cancer???